On Target Detection by Quantum Radar (Preprint)

TL;DR

This paper critically evaluates quantum radar proposals, demonstrating they underperform compared to classical radar and lack practical advantages, especially in detecting stealth targets, thus questioning their current viability.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed analysis showing quantum radar's detection capabilities are far below classical radar and clarifies misconceptions about quantum radar cross sections.

Findings

Quantum radar performance is orders of magnitude worse than classical radar.

Quantum radar proposals lack practical detection advantages.

Quantum radar cross section is effectively indistinguishable from classical radar cross section.

Abstract

Both Noise Radar and Quantum Radar, with some alleged common features, exploit the randomness of the transmitted signal to enhance radar covertness and to reduce mutual interference. While Noise Radar has been prototypically developed and successfully tested in many environments by different organizations, the significant investments on Quantum Radar seem not to be followed by practically operating prototypes or demonstrators. Starting from the trivial fact that radar detection depends on the energy transmitted on the target and backscattered by it, some detailed evaluations in this work show that the detection performance of all the proposed QR types in the literature are orders of magnitude below the ones of a much simpler and cheaper equivalent classica radar set, in particular of the NR type. Moreover, the absence of a, sometimes alleged, Quantum radar cross section different from the radar cross section is explained. Hence, the various Quantum Radar proposals cannot lead to any useful result, especially, but not limited to, the alleged detection of stealth targets.